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Food, Women, and Personal IdentitySelected Chapters from Contemporary Czech Prose
Słowik, Olga ; Heczková, Libuše (advisor) ; Parente Čapková, Viola (referee) ; Matonoha, Jan (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to analyse selected ways in which contemporary Czech prose manifests the complex interconnection of personal (female) identity, gender, and dietary practices. The first part of the thesis develops a theoretical and methodological framework based on anthropologizing approaches to literature, especially those developed in contemporary Polish literary criticism. In these approaches, literature is understood as one kind of linguistic - and more broadly cultural - practice, and interpretation is taken to be one of the most important tasks of literary research. Another theoretical impulse is feminist criticism, which the thesis reflects in its gynocritical selection of texts to analyse and in its understanding of corporeality, everyday life, and personal identity as always gendered. The main part of the thesis consists of four relatively separate interpretative chapters (2-5), which are probes into different ways in which personal (female) identity, gender, and dietary practices are grasped in contemporary Czech prose. The second chapter focuses on autobiographical prose by female authors who have experienced anorexia. The chapter traces the authors' association of the illness with the search for the self, and it addresses key aspects of this search, such as the conflict between...
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